One of four faculty research clusters in Performance Studies. Each cluster offers a possible way for a student to focus their studies; students choose to work across the cluster range, and with a wide variety of faculty.
The relationship of bodies in performance and performative contexts past and present. Identity as and in performance. Embodied experiences of and in performance, sociohistorical, psychological, and physiological. Methods of representing, transforming, and taking a position through the body in performance and performative contexts. Models of understanding human interaction through performance.
This cluster of interest might attract the work of individuals in theater, dance, and performance art as they discuss the experience of individual bodies in performance. It is relevant to scholars of history, sociology and ethnic studies as they talk about identity as a performance and the performative elements of social and group identity. It references the practical implications of embodied training that would have potential significance to psychologists, physiologists, biologists, individuals working with neurocognitive models, artist/practitioners, and exercise scientists. It also deals with questions of representation and documentation of bodies in performance that will encompass scholars working in discursive fields such as literature and languages.
Finally, it attends to the full rhetorical situation of performance as an intersection of bodies, real or virtual, and may interest scholars in technocultural studies, those interested in human performance and ergonomics.
Embodiments embraces the presence of bodies within performance practice, as physiological, psychological, and virtual entities. Research in this space ranges from the phenomenological to the affective, from questions of identity politics as lived on the streets to the psychophysical experiences of a dancer on the stage. It involves the study of consciousness, situational politics, spirituality and activism. Though the body can be imagined as a metaphor for thinking about a relation to the world, this extends beyond the metaphorical to deal with the lived conditions of actual bodies both on stage and off in a wide range of performative situations. Categories such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, ability, age, and class are placed in dialogue with performance and performativity to ask questions such as: How does one’s identity shape one’s social interactions? How is this reflected in performance? How does one perform an identity? How are bodies used, understood, and experienced in the process of performance? What are the relationships between bodies and rituals? How is a body trained and how does this manifest in performance? What cultural expectations are attached by the self and others to the body? What is the reality of sensory experience and how can this be understood in performance? What are the physical and technological limits of the body? How do affect, joy, pain, fear, transform a body in the space of performance? What are the possibilities of the body as a work of art? How is the body used as a tool in performance? How does a performer experience her body? Using methodologies from linguistics, anthropology, psychology, sociology, rhetoric, theater, dance and other ways of thinking about performance, Embodiments explores the possibilities of bodies in process, in action, in performance.